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jfruh (300774) writes "Aereo is currently fighting for its life before the Supreme Court, and has issued a warning: if you take us down, you could take the entire cloud storage industry down with us. The company argues that they only provide customers with access to shows picked up by an individual antenna that they've rented. If the constitutes a 'public performance,' then so does the act of downloading a copyrighted document stored in a cloud storage service — even if the customer has purchased the right to use that document."
v3rgEz sent in a link to the transcript of the first day of arguments.

Whether you've been sued is irrelevant to whether it's legal. The Supremes deal with legality, not enforcement.

And the argument isn't binding. The Supremes can find against Aereo and state "the lack of a *formal* agreement and that the content was not uploaded securely by the user himself makes this a distribution by Aereo, and thus a valid legal tort" both making Aereo illegal and securing Cloud for everyone else. The fact that the argument was raised just means it will likely be addressed in the finding.

They deal with pleasing the public these days, not legality. It will be interesting to see which way they go on this. They're quite smart enough to rationalize any possible decision, but that's after the fact.

If they don't like Aereo, I wonder how they'll explain the many apartment buildings with a shared antenna on the roof used by all the residents (though maybe that vanished with analog TV). I'm really tired of pretending that doing some old thing we've done for ever, except "on the internet" somehow makes it legally different.

Why? A long cable is a long cable. Why is there any legal difference? The answer of course I because the lawmakers have been thoroughly corrupted, but that's really it. If Aereo was sending content across advertising markets, reducing the value of local ads, then maybe something's there, but they aren't.

As I understand it, Aereo geographically limits its service to the broadcast range of the transmission towers. Thus there is no programming made available to an Aereo customer that they couldn't legally receive by putting up their own antenna.

mp3.com stored a single copy of each song - and streamed copies of that shared song to users who had shown (by inserting a CD or buying the song from a mp3.com associate) that they owned it. While mp3.com claimed that they were protecting individual Fair Use (or was it First Sale?) rights, the technical point on which they were crucified was not the streaming to individual users, but the creation of the shared database (for their own commercial benefit).

In the Aereo case, they are not taking the signals from a single shared antenna (or from a small group of shared antennas) and replicating them. That would open them to the sort of attack that destroyed mp3.com. Instead, Aereo is taking the technically-very-ugly, but legally-more-likely-to-be-sound approach of having huge farms of micro-antennas, and renting individual antennas to individual customers. It is the broadcast signals from the plaintiffs that are replicating the programs – same as if the broadcast signals hit an equivalent number of rabbit-ears antennas in an equivalent number of houses.

What's the difference, functionally, if I rent a house with an antenna on the roof then use a Slingbox / SiliconDust Homerun or rent a server that has an antenna on it? Practically none to actually none, really. The legal difference will hopefully be the same.

When you're complaining about how the government helps their large donors get what they want, the words you're looking for are "Public Choice Economics", not "Free market!"

A free market implies that the government minimally interferes in the market, just enough to set a level playing field, not that the government determines market outcomes at the behest of it's backers by killing competitors.

Buggy whip makers went out of business because people did not want buggy whips.

Exactly. Nobody stopped cars (or highways) because the buggy whip makers weren't allowed to restrict development and innovation. That would've been crazy. The argument the GP is making is that to allow ABC et al. to shut down Aereo would be akin to letting buggy whip makers prevent cars. Which would be absurd. Reductio ad absurdum, some might say.

Well, he is entirely wrong if that is his argument. Aereo is not producing (or paying for) content, ABC is. Aereo is, in fact, entirely dependant on ABC et al, they just don't think they need to pay for that. Car makers, however, were in no way dependant on buggy whip makers - they were COMPETITORS. If Aereo wants to put ABC out of business by producing their own content and drawing viewers from ABC, ABC can't do anything about it. But as long as their model is 'bleed the host until it is dead', you ca

And they are correct. They are following the same cable laws that birthed the cable industry.

Are you suggesting that cable companies "bled their hosts dry" before the addition of cable channels owned by the networks and then forced into packages? These shows are available for free with ads, you know.

All Aero is actually doing is helping broadcasters fully cover their area. The broadcasters are just upset because they somehow maneuvered the cable companies into paying them for the privilege of helping them whitewash the fence.

ABC(and others) offer content effectively for free via local broadcast. Their profit comes from commercials. All Aereo is doing is providing the antenna and DVR capabilities over the internet, thus allowing you to view from alternative locations and devices. The users are paying a small premium to have the hardware, storage and upload bandwidth managed offsite. There is nothing about this setup that an individual couldn't do with their own equipment. Aereo isn't taking any more money from the content providers than any other DVR/VCR would.

There actually were a few crazy laws invented mostly to make cars impractical. Some of them never went off the books, they just got ignored so long that nobody even remembers they exist.

For example, at one time, when crossing an intersection, the driver was to stop the car, turn off the engine, get out and yell loudly. If nobody answered, he was to honk a loud horn. If nobody answered, he was to fire a gun into the air. Then, finally he was permitted to restart the car and continue. Supposedly this was to a

People just wanted to get from one place to another; how didn't matter much.

Part of a transport system is personal (the carriage) and part is infrastructural (the road). Those whose market was on the personal side wanted to control the infrastructural side, which is the problem.

You are incorrectly confabulating broadcasting with content producing.

It is not "content producers" that people don't want because guess what it isn't the content producers that are suing Aereo.

Instead it is the over the air broadcasters that are suing and no one wants them. They are not all the producers and not all of them produce content
Back before we had internet, cable TV, and satellite TV, actual over the air broadcasting made sense. But not any more.

People do want the content - which is why content producers will continue to exist. People do NOT want to receive it by broadcast, which is why people want Aereo to take that junk off the air and put it on wires.

Yes it is true that the broadcasters used to be wealthy and therefore bought up most (but not all) of the content producers. Now the broadcasters are going the way of the Buggy Whip. They may be able to survive as content producers, but only if they stop trying to marry their content production to their horrible, stupid delivery system that few people want and is only be propped up by out-dated laws.

If they insist on sending their wonderful content out on horrible radiowaves, then they will have to do so a week after they offer them to cable operators (just like Hulu does with Hulu prime.). You want the stuff right away, pay for it. If you don't care, wait for for it.

Instead it is the over the air broadcasters that are suing and no one wants them.

Except all the people who have antennas and rely on OTA for their content. Perhaps because they don't have/don't want to pay for broadband?

People do NOT want to receive it by broadcast, which is why people want Aereo to take that junk off the air and put it on wires.

Of course there are people who want to receive "it" by broadcast. And there are already wired modes to get "it".

This is a case of a new player using the broadcast signal to provide a pay service without remuneration to the broadcast source. The broadcaster is paying the fees for the content and getting nothing in return.

This is a case of a new player using the broadcast signal to provide a pay service without remuneration to the broadcast source. The broadcaster is paying the fees for the content and getting nothing in return.

They are getting the ad revenue, just like they get for everyone else in their area that puts up an antenna.

The only thing that's "horrible" is your ridiculous assertion that no one wants over the air broadcasting.

Perhaps you weren't aware that over the air broadcasting now comes in a digital format(I know, who'd thunk!)
The signal I get to my HD tv looks great, always comes in perfectly, regardless of the weather(now that I have my antennae setup correctly). I have friends who have their content delivered "on wires" as you say, and I've seen it, and I'm amazed people would pay cable or satellite for such lo

Of course the over the air broadcasters are complaining. They actual PAY for the content. Then Aereo comes and leeches off the broadcasters, taking away a source of revenue, without paying anything. When Aereo actually produces (or pays for) it's own content, then you may have a point.

How are they taking away a source of revenue? (bear with me... I haven't looked into Aereo much... maybe they're offering commercial skipping or something)

I get that the broadcaster has legit deals in place for the content the distribute.I get that Aereo is sending that broadcast content to users.But Aereo is using (supposedly) one antenna per user, and nothing is recorded (AFAIK), so the user is getting the exact same content they would get for free over the air.This doesn't take away anything from the bro

They are following cable laws that were enacted to allow those with poor reception an option to get their local channels. These laws allowed the cable operators to show free channels for free, which is exactly what Aereo is doing.

Let's be clear, what worries the broadcaster is the threat to their business model. If Aereo wins this opens the door to legal challenges against the retransmission fees cable & satellite companies pay for channels that are already broadcast locally free of charge.

Marketing myopia is a term used in marketing as well as the title of an important marketing paper written by Theodore Levitt.[1] This paper was first published in 1960 in the Harvard Business Review, a journal of which he was an editor. Marketing Myopia suggests that businesses will do better in the end if they concentrate on meeting customers' needs rather than on selling products.

The Myopic culture, Levitt postulated, would pave the way for a business to fail, due to the short-sighted mindset and illusion that a firm is in a so-called 'growth industry'. This belief leads to complacency and a loss of sight of what customers want.

[snip]

There is a greater scope of opportunities as the industry changes. It trains managers to look beyond their current business activities and think "outside the box". George Steiner (1979) is one of many in a long line of admirers who cite Levitt's famous example on transportation. If a buggy whip manufacturer in 1910 defined its business as the "transportation starter business," they might have been able to make the creative leap necessary to move into the automobile business when technological change demanded it

So, how about this... you refute the underlying thing meant when most of us say "buggy whips", and I won't tell you how little I care about how you feel about the specifics of the metaphor. Sound fair?

The point is, in the face of technological changes and advancement, instead of understanding what it is people actually want and enabling it, these companies are demonstrating short-sightedness, an unwillingness to adapt their business model, and due to lobbying and other crap, exert an undue level of control over industries relating to technology which is both unwarranted, outdated, and has an overall detrimental effect on progress by people who don't have their heads up their asses.

Now, if you have anything intelligent to add, I'm all ears. If you're going to simply dispute the metaphor keep it to yourself.

A lot of people do not want the content either. However that's sort of irrelevant because the argument isn't about an industry that's getting out of date or is obsolete, but about the industry exerting too much control over their product which goes above and beyond what the common understanding of the law is. This is an industry that fought in the supreme court against merely time shifting the content using video recorders.

'Common understanding of the law' according to who? While the copyright law is pretty large, the basic concept behind copyright law is in the Constitution - creators shall have exclusive right to their works.

the basic concept behind copyright law is in the Constitution - creators shall have exclusive right to their works... for a limited time, in exchange for releasing it into the public domain at the end of that period, for the enrichment of American culture

I mean that the general understanding of the law by the public (whether or not it matches the letter of the law) is that content can be viewed when and where and how they want, as long as no duplicate is made. This includes time shifting, removing commercials, viewing/listening/reading/playing on unapproved devices.

Just how many industries will we allow the content industry to ruin in its death throes before we finally get wiser?

It is not the content industry that is attacking Aereo.. its not even the cable companies.

It is the broadcasters that are attacking Aereo because if Aereo is allowed to do what they are doing, then cable companies (who want to see Aereo win) can go ahead and do exactly what Aereo is doing, so they can avoid paying any redistribution fees to the broadcasters.

The industry is all the same. Local stations are owned by major broadcasters, which are merged with major cable companies, which are part of conglomerates that own movie and television studios and distribution rights.

So what, cloud based DVR is not not acceptable? Why is time shifting OK in a box in my livingroom but not on a box at some hosting service? Does it matter if I own or rent the actual server that is being used for the time shifting? What is so important about the internet that it invalidates the rights we have elsewhere?

This industry also does not think that time shifting in your living room is ok, it's just that they were overruled on the time shifting issue by the supreme court.

They want to control where, when, and how the content is viewed. If they sell ads for for an 8pm time slot for Boise then they do not want you to watch that program at 10pm in Omaha (Aereo would at least keep the local ads which is why it's not a nationwide service).

Sort of ironic here in that content providers logically should support streaming

How is that different than having your own antenna and recording to a DVR? The identical arguments can be made there.

I'm an Aereo subscriber. Why? If I lived close enough to the city, I'd use an antenna and a DVR. But, there's a 3300' mountain between me and the city. I can't put an antenna up high enough that'll get even a single channel. Aereo can. I still watch their stupid ads, so the revenue model of the networks is unaffected.

Ahahahahaha! Are you joking? Comcast and Time Warner ARE content companies. That's the whole problem. Content providers should be completely separate from internet providers. When they aren't, the internet/content providers have incentive to make sure their content is unfairly promoted/protected on their networks. If you think Comcast/Time Warner will ever stand up to content companies I've got some wonderful property in the Everglades in which you might be interested.

From a legal basis Aereo's business model seems sound to me -- all they're doing is helping me receive a broadcast TV transmission which I'm entitled to receive over the airwaves anyway.

On the other hand, a ruling in Aereo's favor would be a boon for the cable companies and could kill the concept of free, broadcast TV altogether. As things stand, the cable companies pay the networks to retransmit feeds of their programming. If Aereo wins, the cable companies would be able to save money by erecting Aereo-style antenna arrays for their cable feeds, bypassing payments to the networks.

As things stand, cable customers are getting screwed because they're paying the broadcasters for the same programming twice -- once in the form of advertisements, and again by paying for the network broadcast feeds. On the other hand, by using my own antenna, I'm receiving dozens of free channels which are being subsidized by the cable customers. If Aereo prevails, broadcasters may terminate over-the-air broadcasts altogether to avoid losing their lucrative royalties from the cable companies, leaving me out in the cold.

This surprises me. If the cable companies used to do this, then why do they pay royalties to the networks nowadays? Why is Aereo getting sued if they're doing the same thing the cable companies can do?

From the transcript, here is the argument the cable companies are giving that distinguishes the two. From pages 16-17:

But the reason there's a fundamental difference between the RS DVR at issue in CableVision and what Aereo provides is, as Justice Alito alluded to,
the fact that there's a license in the CableVision context to get the initial performance to the public. And so then I think appropriately the focus in the CableVision context becomes just the playback feature and just the timeshifting that's enabled by that. And in that context, if you focus only on that, then the RS DVR looks a lot like a locker service where you have to come in with the content before you can get content out and you only get back the same content. And here is what really I think Aereo is like. Aereo is like if CableVision, having won in the Second Circuit, decides: Whew, we won, so guess what? Going forward, we're going to dispense with all these licenses, and we are just going to try to tell people we are just an RS DVR, that's all we are, and never mind that we don't have any licensed ability to get the broadcast in the first instance, and we're going to provide it to individual users, and it's all going to be because they push buttons and not because we push buttons. If that were the hypothetical, I don't know how that wouldn't be the clearest violation of the 1976 Act.

Because the providers have "packaged" everything together and send C&Ds about carrying their "free" channel if you didn't pay for their "pay" channels. And none of the cable companies have wanted to fight that lately, because dropping the "free" channel is the best way to get 100,000 pissed off residents to flood the channel with complaints.

This is how 'cablevision' used to work. They'd put up a big antenna that could pull down signals you couldn't

There is a huge difference: Cablevision put up *one* antenna and used that signal for thousands of users. Hence, public performance.

Aereo rents each individual user their own, private antenna. (Yes, if they have 10,000 subscribers, they have 10,000 antennas). Hence this is NOT a public performance; you are only watching what your own, private, rented equipment is receiving.

If the broadcasters that transmit over the public airways want to cease using these airways then fine let them do that. The government can then take the airways back and auction them off for other uses. The whole concept of over the air broadcast television is rather outdated anyway.

Did it ever occur to you that neither advertising fees nor subscription fees are enough, by themselves, to cover the cost and still make a profit?

It does not matter in the slightest what the 'original' method was. Back then, there were only a very few choices of what to watch, so each network had a huge number of viewers. Adverstising rates could be set high enough to cover the costs, because there was no other way for advertisers to reach that many people. Today, there are many, many choices for an adve

The cable companies may run into a problem doing what you suggest unless they send a separate stream from the antenna designated for your exclusive use to your (and, only your) STB. That would be a lot of duplicated bandwidth on the cable on Superbowl Sunday or after a 9/11 so I imagine quite a bit of infrastructure upgrade would be required.

Aereo seems to avoid the "public performance" in part by sending a dedicated stream to you (and only you), albeit over shared internet infrastructure. (I assume that if

(I assume that if 1000 of their customers record the latest episode of Big Bang, they keep 1000 copies of it - if not, their argument would be a bit weaker).

And I wonder what that means.. In an age of deduplicated storage your storage vendor's stack is going to detect that there are 1000 copies of the same shit on the storage device and only actually store one copy.

If Aereo wins, the cable companies would be able to save money by erecting Aereo-style antenna arrays for their cable feeds, bypassing payments to the networks.

It's not just the antennae, Aereo keeps and transmits an individual copy of the show which owned specifically by the user requesting it. Unless Cable is going to set up a channel on the line for each and every subscriber, which can only be accessed by them and many of which will be duplications of each other, they don't have the same legal justification. Now, they could do it the same way Aereo does it, saving the shows for each customer and delivering it over an IP video stream, but they can't just broadcast it to all their subscribers as a single "channel".

The fact that it's cheaper to create thousands of antennae and record thousands of hours of duplicated content and then deliver it using internet bandwidth rather than paying a fee to the providers and doing a simple broadcast says a lot about whats wrong with the content industry.

I think they will rule that Aereo is a cable company and is required to pay the fee. Congress wrote a special law that requires cable companies to pay the fees. Congress did this in reponse to a court ruling saying something similer to your position.

(IANAL). I was quite surprised this even reached the high court. The broadcasters have a revenue model of paying by putting ads in front of eyeballs. This service arguably helps them meet that goal. Yes, I'm sure they'd like to double-dip and get paid for the "rebroadcast," but if you are giving your product away for free over the public airwaves, you should not be allowed to complain about where folks choose to locate their antennas. Be happy for the extra eyeballs.

Indeed - Aereo is delivering my eyeballs to broadcasters I couldn't access before. I live in an area where there are 4 channels available over the air, and only one of the major networks (without resorting to directional, amplified antennas). About 70 miles away is a major metro area with tens of channels available. I can sign up for Aereo and access those channels that just don't reach out here.

(I haven't, because I don't watch enough broadcast TV to justify even having Aereo. I don't have cable,

Some idiot decided that it was reasonable for people that broadcast their programing over the air for free to then charge other people to retransmit it.

It was a bad law in the first place, poorly written, which let the networks charge money to cable people when their entire original business was charging advertisers and giving their stuff away for free.

Suddenly you let them charge others for their stuff that they agreed to give away for free originally and this caused the problems.

Aero are not doing anything wrong. The people doing wrong things are the over the air free TV networks that are charging.

The real truth is that the over the air for free model is OUTDATED - just like the buggy whips. I know of nobody actually using the radio waves. They only work in small areas and are only profitable if there is a large population. But in those areas you get so much more from cable TV.

In areas with less population, the over the air broadcasters are not profitable.

First, the primary networks are required, by law, to provide OTA service. They were also required to transmit in digital vs the older, analog signal. Supposedly, the digital signals can transmit further and can support error correction (to eliminate ghost images).

As another poster noted, IF you are in range of to receive the OTA broadcast, the HD picture is of higher quality that what you would get via cable. Why? Cable network providers must compress the signal resulting in signal degradation. OTA can send the full, uncompressed digital signal. One of these days, I will have to see if I can receive the signal where I live...probably not.

Digital signals do not transmit further than Analog signals! In fact, the range of a watchable signal is severely reduced. The clarity of the digital signal is significantly better and remains nearly perfect until the edge of the transmission range, but beyond that it completely degrades, whereas the analog signal is of poor quality, but still viable for many more miles.

I think your a little confused. The OTA (ATSC) standard is still sending compressed video (mostly MPEG2) , just that the bit rate tends to be higher than what most (some?) cable companies provide for their digital content.

See also netflix, which tends to have even lower "HD" quality than the cable companies. With the advent of lossy compression the quality of a show just as much to do with bitrate and compression algorithm than resolution/color depth/framera

I suppose you could make Aereo's analogy to cloud storage if their business were primarily to allow you to upload content to them for streaming to your mobile devices wherever you are. That would make certain sense, and the privacy of the user to upload whatever they want should outweigh the rights of the networks to snoop on users to try to catch unauthorized uses of their copyrighted content.

But the service Aereo is selling is a 'cheap DVR in the cloud', which is a very different thing. I suppose the bi

One of the justices asked flat-out if there were technical advantages to having multiple antennas or if it was just a way to get around copyright, and the lawyer dodged the question.

*Of course* the primary reason for having multiple antennas is copyright. It is exactly *because* they have multiple antennas that what they're doing is legal under current copyright law. By ducking and evading the question, the lawyer just looks shady.

From a technical point of view they'd be far better off with a pair of redundant antennas, storing all the shows from all the channels (with deduplication), and then serving them to their subscribers on demand. But that's clearly not allowed under current law.

You seem to be intimating that the ridiculous efforts Aereo had to go to, to get the single to another part of the country was Aereos fault. It's not. The single is broadcast by the network of their own will... the user could, technically, set up their own highly sensitive antenna equipment and amplifiers and get a TV signal from any station in the country... but that would be very expensive. The idea that there's a distinction between such a setup, relaying the data across IP or the crazy Antenna setup tha

The antenna array is a beautiful piece of marketing by Aereo. Who could object to renting an antenna?

And, in fact, if the output of that antenna -- that is, the radio-frequency signal -- was transmitted to the home (as CableVision was doing back in the day) I think that Aereo would have an slam dunk. But that's not what they are doing.

They are converting the microwatt signal coming out of these antennas a few times. First, they are separating out just the channel that the user wants to watch, then they a

I own a TV Antenna in my attic, and a HDHomeRun box that sits in my wiring closet. The TV antenna goes to the HDHomeRun, which then converts the microwatt signal coming out of the antenna a few time, first separating out the channel i want to watch, then digitizing that signal, then streams it over TCP/IP to my HTPC, which then saves it to a HDD for later playback.

If I move it across town and access it via a VPN does it suddenly make it illegal?

Actually thier argument is it would be illegal to just take the output and transmit it because Congress outlawed what CableVision did in 1992. Digitizing the signal for a single channel is how they are different from CableVision.

The antenna array is actually solid engineering and science. Saying each element belongs to one person is a hoot.

The dime size antenna (that looks to approximate the LC values in each small section of a lossy transmission line used as a receive Metamaterial antenna) for each listener.http://individual.utoronto.ca/... [utoronto.ca]

Suppose I rent an apartment in New York, and I setup an antenna to pick-up New York broadcasts. Then I stream those broadcasts to my TV at home. Have I illegally retransmitted the signal and I need to pay a licensing fee?

Broadcasters earn revenue from advertising. Aero is faithfully streaming content including all advertising to their customers. Clearly what is needed is a partnership for Aero to report viewer demographics back to broadcasters, who can pad onto their numbers when selling ads.

Aero is charging too little for their service. Their model is stupid. They are trying to counter cable carriers charging $50, 60, 100+/mo with a service that's $8 and $12. Aero should charge $29 and kick $15 per customer per month to the cable carrier(s) in the market in which each customer resides. Aero is then in the infrastructure business. The cable companies get build out absolutely free, without having to sink billions of dollars into last mile wiring of neighborhoods, and Aero gets massive revenue stream in a highly symbiotic relationship. For Aero customers, the cable company is is the content licensing and resale business - and the best part - they don't have to service & support those customers, Aero does.

Addtionally, if Aero has such a wonderful idea, there is nothing stopping Comcast from doing exactly the same thing. What is more expensive - the cost of bandwidth, or the cost of pulling copper, telephony or fiber to every house * N tens of millions of customers? Bandwidth is down for a few cents per gigabyte streamed now. How much does a nationwide fiber buildout cost?

This case is really about constipated thinking and reactionary fear in the face of changing climate.

If the [sic] constitutes a 'public performance,' then so does the act of downloading a copyrighted document stored in a cloud storage service

Who stored the copyrighted document on the cloud storage device? If it was the user who had already purchased the rights to said storage from the provider of the copyrighted content then there's no problem at all. If it was the cloud service itself or somebody else that stored it there, ready for any end user who pays for the service to access it, then I can see t

I just want to point out to any Aereo users that should they get shut down, you can still go back to the Pirate bay and start real piracy again. It's a lot easier than this nonsense, all the commercials are edited out for you already AND if you thought you were sticking it to the broadcasting industry before, you'd really be sticking it to them now.

I just want to point out to any Aereo users that should they get shut down, you can still go back to the Pirate bay and start real piracy again. It's a lot easier than this nonsense, all the commercials are edited out for you already AND if you thought you were sticking it to the broadcasting industry before, you'd really be sticking it to them now.

At first I assumed Aereo's lawyers were just trying to fan the flames. No way would the ruling affect serving up documents out of the cloud.
That would be as bogus as arresting people for announcing software bugs after giving a company a few months to fix them.
Or like being able to copyright a one click checkout.
That would be absurd.

Well then that would just be a silly decision. What's the legal justification for such a ruling? Other than "we don't like what Aereo's doing but we don't want to destroy the up and coming cloud industry" there isn't one.

What a strange thing! I guess I am allowed to time-shift broadcast TV, and I am allowed to space-shift broadcast TV. I can rent an antenna, and I can rent a VCR (PVR).

I cannot retransmit (time or space shifted or not) a broadcast to other parties (which is the difference here CATV rebroadcast to all CATV clients).

Now I have to read the arguments! About the only thing left is having an agent do the time or space shifting for me! And, of course, I can't really figure out is why the AGENT is in court for this. If my neighbour asks me to rent her some roofspace and rent her an antenna AND a VCR and then asks me to record a TV show... for which I may charge a bit for the service. And the TV network comes after someone, why would that be me? I would be inclined to laugh.

I think my lawyer would have a good laugh too. We refer you to the reply given in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram.

I guess I am not allowed to sell my labour freely in the USA. Now I REALLY have to follow this. I am personally guilty of renting antennas, and PVR (equivalent) to provide people with recordings. I never pressed a "record" button -- my customer went on-line to a web page and selected the recording themselves (using MythTV 10 years ago). I would deliver the recorded program(s) via disk drives or flash drives.

After all, if I have multiple tuners and I am not using them all, why CAN'T I RENT THEM OUT.

The only problem would have been an event like the "Superbowl" where I would have needed to have ALL my tuners capturing the same content. Instead of being efficient, you know, and sharing... Because WHERE the bits come from is important in Copyright law. See http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry... [sooke.bc.ca]

As long as Aereo uses an antenna and receiver PER USER, the bits should be the right colour. And subject to the users rights. Including time and space shifting. Aereo wouldn't be rebroadcasting. IF Aereo IS IN THE WRONG then the question is why. As far as I can tell, they are not even being an agent for the user. They are simply renting an antenna and receiver. The actual Copyright material is NOT being shared, from Aereo's perspective. And yes, cloud storage would be at risk. For example, I quite enjoy using Kobo. I may purchase a book from Kobo WHICH IS Copyrighted. Of course. I then download to my reading device. The bits have the right colour at Kobo's end, and they have the right colour at my end. I should be able to do with those bits ANYTHING that Copyright law permits me to. And I do. There is no DRM in OTA broadcast, and typically there is DRM in Kobo electronic books. If *I* turn around and share the book, Kobo wouldn't be legally liable. The author would come after me for that. So why is Aereo being attacked here?

If the bits are simply coloured "copyrighted" and it IS authorized to the user, what else should Aereo do? Simply, Kobo is selling access to authorized bits as well, and would be AT THE SAME RISK. And, it goes deeper. Since Copyright is automatically assigned on creation, you would have NO IDEA what is ok to look at, here or touch.

I did the same thing. I cut the cord when I bought my first home, since at the time I couldn't afford the $200/month Comcast wanted for Cable, Internet, and Phone (which they all but demanded you bundle by charging twice as much for any one of them without the other two).

I got DSL from a CLEC (because you could still do that at the time) for $25/month, and got Fios internet-only when that came around about 5 years later.

I've moved since then, and I sold my TVs in the process. I don't have a TV in my house,